A variety of swimmer training devices are known and have been widely used for many years. Certain early system utilized vertically movable weight stacks or elastic mechanisms tethered to a swimmer to provide a resistive force as the swimmer swims one direction in a swimming lane, and/or to provide assistive forces as the swimmer swims the other direction in the swimming lane. It has been recognized for some time that performance of swimming athletes can be enhanced by specialized training regimens using the resistive or assistive mechanisms described above. Conventional systems, however, long suffered from a variety of drawbacks, including expense, complexity and inapplicability to certain desired training regimens.
In an attempt to introduce automation and computer control and monitoring to swimming training, as had been done earlier in certain other sports, in recent years manufacturers proposed a variety of mechanisms where a swimmer tethering line is spooled or unspooled about a rotatable mechanism. The speed of rotation of the rotatable mechanism could be controlled, and in certain instances brakes were selectively applied to the rotatable mechanism to apply a frictional drag. These systems generally improved over elastic bands, weight stacks and the like in terms of controllability and applicability to different training regimens. However, many swimmers and swimming trainers have viewed such systems unfavorably from a performance standpoint as well as expense, reliability and general feel. On the one hand, swimming against a frictional drag or a varying speed of the rotatable mechanism may impart a perceived unnatural feel. Moreover, applying a frictional drag does not always provide an easy mechanism for gathering and processing data associated with a swimmer's performance. Further, while electric motors may have a controllable speed, they typically do not provide a variable force, at least without also varying speed. Further still, existing systems lack any mechanism for readily determining power output or peak power output of a swimmer, factors suggested as useful by swimmer training research.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,391,080 to Bernacki et al. proposes a swim instruction, training and assessment apparatus. Bernacki et al. is representative of one class of swimmer training systems that, while improving over various earlier strategies, suffer from certain of the drawbacks discussed above. Namely, Bernacki et al. does not provide for smooth controllability of resistive or assistive forces applied to a swimmer, and does not allow for easy determination of power output or peak power output of a swimmer.
The present disclosure is directed in part to one or more of the problems or shortcomings set forth above.